The Birth of the Pill

In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then 71, who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, met a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation, Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, [...]
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In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then 71, who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, met a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation, Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, he succeeded. Spanning the years from Sanger's heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes.